The elastic snapped against my thumb, a sharp, stinging reminder that some things simply refuse to be contained. I was standing in the laundry room of the hospice facility, trying to fold a fitted sheet-a task that has always felt like an elaborate prank played by textile manufacturers on the human race. You tuck one corner into the other, try to smooth the bunching fabric, and within 3 seconds, the whole structure collapses into a shameful, lumpy ball. It is the ultimate exercise in futility. I hate it. I do it every Tuesday because it’s the only thing in this building that doesn’t require me to manage someone’s soul, and yet, here I was, losing a fight to a piece of polyester-blend bedding.

I manage 43 volunteers, and most of my day is spent convincing them that their primary job is to be absolutely, 103% useless. That’s the contrarian truth of care: the more ‘productive’ you try to be, the less helpful you are. If a volunteer goes into a room with the goal of ‘fixing’ a mood or ‘completing’ a conversation, they’ve already failed. The patient doesn’t need a project manager; they need a witness. We have professionalized presence to such a degree that we’ve forgotten how to just be in a room together without an invoice or a clinical outcome attached to the visit.

The Managed Relationship

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They were so busy managing the death that they weren’t actually present for the dying. Martha didn’t need a logistics team; she needed them to sit on the edge of the bed and talk about the time they burnt the Thanksgiving turkey back in ’93.

– Hospice Experience, 13 Days of Silence

There is a profound loneliness in being managed. When we turn our relationships into tasks, we strip them of the very thing that makes them worth having. We see this in the broader world, too, not just in hospice. We’ve outsourced our social lives to algorithms and our domestic lives to apps. People are starving for a touch that doesn’t have an ulterior motive.

People are starving for a touch that doesn’t have an ulterior motive. Services like Dukes of Daisy exist because the alternative-true, crushing isolation-is a price no one should have to pay. We are paying for the space to be seen, because we’ve forgotten how to offer that space to each other for free.

The Air Traffic Controller of Empathy

It’s a contradiction I live with every day. I get paid a salary to coordinate people who aren’t getting paid to sit with people who are dying. I’m trying to guide these fragile little planes to a safe landing, but I’m doing it from a control tower made of bureaucracy.

We are so afraid of doing it wrong-of saying the wrong thing, of being awkward-that we opt out of the experience entirely. We wait for a professional. We wait for a ‘system.’

The Reality of The End

Arthur died 3 hours later. Leo was the one who called it in. He told me later that they hadn’t spoken more than 3 sentences to each other. But those sentences were about the texture of the air in New Orleans in the summer. It wasn’t ‘efficient.’ It didn’t meet any of the 13 metrics for spiritual support that I’m supposed to track for the state. But it was real.

I went back to the laundry room after Leo left. I picked up that same fitted sheet. I realized that my frustration with the sheet was actually a frustration with myself-my desire to have everything tucked in and tidy. I wanted the world to be a series of 90-degree angles. But the world is 333 shades of grey and a lot of frayed edges.

I finally gave up on the sheet. I didn’t fold it. I just rolled it into a soft, chaotic ball and put it on the shelf. It looked ridiculous next to the perfectly stacked flat sheets, but it felt honest. We spend so much energy pretending we have it under control.

The Final Luxury of Being

Maybe the goal isn’t to get the corners to match. Maybe the goal is just to stay in the room until the laundry is done. I walked back to my desk, ignored the 3 unread voicemails on my machine, and just sat there for a minute, feeling the weight of my own breath.

And that, I think, is the only thing that actually matters.